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Agility@Scale: Strategies for Scaling Agile Software Development

Scott is a Senior Consulting Partner of Scott W. Ambler and Associates, working with organizations around the world to help them to improve their software processes. He provides training, coaching, and mentoring in disciplined agile and lean strategies at both the project and organizational level. He is the founder of the Agile Modeling (AM), Agile Data (AD), Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), and Enterprise Unified Process (EUP) methodologies. Scott is the (co-)author of 19 books, including Disciplined Agile Delivery, Refactoring Databases, Agile Modeling, Agile Database Techniques, The Object Primer 3rd Edition, and The Enterprise Unified Process. Scott is a senior contributing editor with Dr. Dobb's Journal and his company home page is ScottWAmbler.com

Agility@Scale: Strategies for Scaling Agile Software Development

I recently did the voice over for our Rational.Everyware Agility@Scale whiteboard video, which is a bit less than 4 minutes in length. As I narrate a whiteboard sketch evolves, sometimes using sticky-notes and index cards, to help explain what I'm talking about.

In the video, I describe:

The history of agile

Some of the challenges surrounding traditional development

Some of the basics of agile, such as increased collaboration with stakeholders and on delivery of consumable solutions

The benefits of agile, including increased quality, time to value, stakeholder satisfaction, and ROI

I'm happy to announce that I've accepted the role of Managing Director of the Scrum Alliance (SA), a part-time position in addition to my duties here at IBM. On the surface this must appear to be a radical and unpredictable departure for me, considering my history of being critical when it comes to some of the past activities of the Scrum Alliance. To be fair, I've actually been critical of the Certified Scrum Master (CSM) scheme, and rightfully so. But I have also actively embraced the good ideas contained in Scrum and have incorporated them, with attribution, in my writings about Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) and other agile topics. I believe that I've made this very apparent in this blog and in other sources such as the Agile Modeling site. So, it really isn't such a radical departure for me afterall, although still arguably one that was difficult to predict. In fact, one of the reasons why the Scrum Alliance approached me to be Managing Director is the fact that I have been critical of many of the Scrum community's behaviors.

So, over the next few months you're going to see what I believe to be some welcome changes at the Scrum Alliance. Our first step at serving you better will be to apply agile strategies and principles in the way that we work. Importantly, we'll be taking a three pronged strategy based on respect, clarity, and integrity. We have dubbed this strategy "Scrum Alliance 2.0".

Respecting people

To be more respectful of existing and potential SA members, we will begin executing the following activities:

Adopt respectful language on the site. We've begun a review of the SA web site to identify potentially disrespectful language. For example, on the About page we indicate that Scrum trainers pay for your first two years of SA membership fees. Who do we think we're kidding? Those fees are clearly coming out of the money that you paid to take the training and we shouldn't hide this fact. I believe that our improved clarity strategy, see below, will go a long way to increasing our respectfulness towards others.

Tone down the rhetoric. There's been a lot of rhetoric espoused over the years regarding Scrum, which is true of many other issues within the IT industry and not just Scrum. From now on any rhetoric that we do promote we're going to actually live by. For example, not only are we going to claim that Scrum increases visibility (which it can in fact do) we're going to be an examplar of that by being open ourselves. More on this below.

Deprecate the chicken and pig analogy. Calling people chickens and pigs may be fun at first, and to be fair the analogy helps to cut through some of the politics surrounding many project teams, but the terminology is in fact disrespectful. We can and should do better.

Clarity through openness and honesty

We are also starting to execute on four activities for improving the clarity of how we operate:

Be crystal clear about what "not-for-profit" actually means. This is a wonderfully deceptive term from the US tax system which can make organizations appear far more virtuous than they actually are, which is particularly easy in situations where the audience doesn't have a sophisticated knowledge of finance. Not that I'm implying anything. Although we have taken some steps to explain the implications of what being a "not-for-profit" organization means, we could do a lot more by being less self-serving. Yes, the SA isn't a for-profit organization. The implication of this being that we need to spend the money we rake in, but it doesn't imply that as individuals we can't make a lot of money via our SA work. I'm not taking on the position of Managing Director for free after all, and I'm sure that previous MDs have found the position lucrative.

Publish our salaries. To live the high standards which we espouse through our rhetoric, we're going to be very clear about the way that we operate. This includes publishing the salaries of the employees of the SA and the revenue derived from Scrum training of all of our certified trainers. Part of being respectful to our membership is to be clear about how we spend their hard-earned money.

Publish how we spend the rest of the money. After we pay ourselves, how much do we really spend on supporting user groups, education, and research as we claim? Don't you think you deserve to know? I certainly do, which is why we're going to ensure our finances are no longer opaque. With tens of thousands of members and/or "certified masters" running around out there, it's pretty clear that we making a lot of money. To guarantee that money is being spent appropriately we're going to share with our membership where it's coming from and going to.

Publish our meeting minutes. This will be both in written form, e.g. traditional meeting minutes, as well as recorded form (ideally video but at least audio). The only way that our membership can be assured that we're working in an ethical and integral manner is through complete visibility into our operations.

The fundamental idea here is that the Scrum Alliance should have nothing to hide from our membership. We've preached open and honest communication for years, now we're going to start actually living by those words. Yes, it may be a bit painful to work to this level of clarity, but we feel that you deserve this.

Integrity through actions, not words

Finally, we're taking three actions to increase the overall integrity of the Scrum community:

Increase investment in research. Although we've big claims about support Scrum research over the years, very little has actually come of this due to lack of funding (see discussion of salaries above) which can be seen in the serious lack of research results posted at the SA site. Of the six publications at the site tagged as research results, three were performed by Carnigie Mellon University, the home of the Software Engineering Institute, producers of the CMMI. Although I personally respect the work surrounding the CMMI, not that I agree with all of it, I'm concerned about relying on CMU for half of our Scrum research results. We can and should do a lot better, and the first step is to divert some funds away from our own pockets into research. Having actual empirical results, as opposed to espousing rhetoric about empiricism, will go a long way towards more respectful behavior via actual fact-based discussions. Until then, you may find my IT Survey Results page to be a valuable resource.

Deprecate the Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) certification. Although I would prefer to end this embarrassment immediately, we need to be respectful of the fact that CSM courses have been scheduled several months in advance and some people have already paid for seats in them. So, as of June 30th 2011 the CSM certification will be deprecated. This should give our Certified Scrum Trainers time to rework their business models and focus on more respectable activities.

Existing CSMs must clarify the certification. People who have previously "earned" the CSM designation will be grandfathered in until December 21st, 2012 in accordance with the Mayan Calendar. However, until that time all CSMs who choose to indicate their designation publicly (many CSMs choose not to) in email signatures, business cards and so on must now use the following wording - "Certified ScrumMaster (earned by staying awake during a two/three day training course)". This wording reflects our new desire for clear and open communication as well as for being respectful. Far too many people are fooled by the terms "certified" and "master" and we're going to do our best to reduce this problem through greater clarity.

As I hope you have guessed by now this blog is an April Fool's joke. I have no intention of becoming the Managing Director of the Scrum Alliance and my condolences go out to anyone who would take on this position. This blog posting does however reflect what I would do to bring greater clarity, integrity, and respect to the Scrum community. The Scrum Alliance can and should choose to do a lot better. I hope it has been food for thought.

For some reason, it seems as if everyone's grandfather at one point in time recommended to use the right tools for the job. That's practical wisdom from my point of view, one that is certainly an issue for agile development.

One of the primary messages, I hope, of the Agile Scaling Model (ASM) is that context counts. Although the focus of the ASM is on describing a contextual framework for tailoring your process to meet the needs of the situation that you find yourself in, it's also applicable to your tooling selection. For example, the tool choices of a co-located team will be much different than that of a geographically distributed team. A co-located team will likely use a whiteboard or paper for their agile modeling efforts, whereas distributed team members may need to capture their diagrams using a more sophisticated tool such as Rational Requirements Composer (RRC) so that their work can be shared electronically. Having said that, RRC would be overkill for a co-located team (unless they had regulatory compliance issues). Different teams, different situations, therefore different tooling choices.

One of the concerns that I run into from customers is that some of our legacy products don't support agile very well. Once again, it's a matter of context because many of our legacy products reflect the realities faced by more traditional teams. The challenge occurs when you try to take a legacy product which is well suited for traditional development, such as Rational ClearCase, and try to apply it on agile projects. Although ClearCase makes sense in certain scaling situations, particularly very large teams that are geographically distributed, you'd be better advised to use something like Rational Team Concert (RTC) for configuration management on most agile teams (note that RTC does far more than just SCM).

So, if you're taking an agile approach you should consider Rational tools such as RTC, RRC, Rational BuildForge, Rational AppScan, and others which support agile development. Granted, some you would only use at scale -- for example Buildforge is a good option in really complex environments, but if you don't face that complexity then you'll likely find that RTC's build engine is sufficient. Similarly, if you're taking a traditional approach to development then you'll likely consider products such as ClearCase, Appscan, RTC, and Rational Software Architect (RSA) instead. Different situations, different tooling choices.

What's even more confusing is that some products support a range of process paradigms. For example, RTC supports agile, lean, iterative, and traditional approaches to development. The same can be said of Appscan and several other products. Notice how I listed RTC and Appscan for both agile and traditional development above.

So, if anyone tells you that Rational tools don't support agile development don't believe them. Ask them which tools that they're talking about, and ask them if they're aware of the Rational products that do support agile development. Context counts.

I'm happy to announce that a revised version of the Lean Development Governance white paper which I co-wrote with Per Kroll is now available. This version of the paper reflects our learnings over the past few years helping organizations to improve their governance strategies.

There is a distinct rhythm, or cadence, at different levels of the agile process. We call this the agile 3C rhythm, for coordinate, collaborate, and conclude (which is sometimes called stabilize). The agile 3C rhythm occurs at three levels in Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD):

Day. A typical day begins with a short coordination meeting, called a Scrum meeting in the Scrum method. After the daily coordination meeting the team collaborates throughout most of the day to perform their work. The day concludes with a working build, hopefully you had several working builds throughout the day, which depending on your situation may require a bit of stabilization work to achieve.

Iteration. DAD construction iterations begin with an iteration planning session (coordinate) where the team identifies a detailed task list of what needs to be done that iteration. Note that iteration modeling is often part of this effort. Throughout the iteration they collaborate to perform the implementation work. They conclude the iteration by producing a potentially consumable solution, a demo of that solution to key stakeholders, and a retrospective to identify potential improvements in the way that they work.

There is a fair bit of rhetoric surrounding agile methods, some of which we subscribe to and some of which we don’t. We’d like to briefly examine the rhetoric which we’ve found to be the most misleading for people trying to be effective at adopting agile techniques. The following list is in the format X but Y, where X is the rhetoric and Y is the strategy promoted by the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process framework. This includes:

Requirements evolve throughout the lifecycle BUT the scope should still be agreed to at the beginning of the project. There has to be an initial vision for a project, a vision which your stakeholders should help define and then agree to, and to come to that vision you will need to perform some initial requirements envisioning. A list of high level features is part of this initial vision. Yes, the details are very likely to evolve over time but the fundamental goals of your project and scope of your effort needs to be defined early in your project. In a very small minority of situations you may not be able to get the right people together, either physically or virtually, to define the initial vision – this should be seen as a significant project risk.

Simple designs are best BUT the architecture should be thought out early in the lifecycle. Too many developers interpret the advice to focus on simple designs to mean that they should build everything from scratch. Yet more often than not the simplest design is to take advantage of what is already there, and the best way to do that is to work closely with people who understand your existing technical infrastructure. Investing in a little bit of architectural envisioning early in the lifecycle enables your team to identify existing enterprise assets that you can leverage, to identify your architectural options, and to select what appears to be the best option available to you. The details will still emerge over time, and some decisions will be deferred until a later date when it’s more appropriate to make them, but the bottom line is that disciplined agilists think before they act.

Teams should be self organizing BUT they are still constrained (and enhanced) by your organizational ecosystem. Intellectual workers, including IT professionals, are most effective when they have a say in what work they do and how they do it. IT professionals can improve their productivity by following common conventions, leveraging and building out a common “dev-ops” infrastructure, building towards a common vision, and by working to common business and technical visions. In short, disciplined agile professionals are "enterprise aware".

Delivery teams don’t need prescriptive process definitions BUT they do need some high-level guidance to help organize their work. Individual IT professionals are typically highly-skilled and highly-educated people often with years of experience, and teams of such people clearly have a wide range of knowledge. As a result of this knowledge it is incredibly rare for such people to read detailed procedures for how to do their work. However, they often still require some high-level advice to help them to organize their work effectively. Teams can often benefit from techniques and patterns used by other teams and this knowledge sharing should be encouraged.

IT professionals know what to do BUT they’re still not process experts. A decade ago the strategy was to provide detailed process advice to teams, but recently the pendulum has swung the other way to provide little or no defined process at all. Over the last few years there’s been a trend within the agile community to advise teams to define their own process so that it’s tailored to their own unique situation. While this clearly strokes people’s egos, it’s relatively poor advice for several reasons. First, although every team is in a unique situation there is significant commonality so having at least a high-level process framework from which to start makes sense. Second, although these teams have a wide range of knowledge it might not be complete, nor consistent, nor is it clear what the trade-offs are of combining all the really good techniques that people know about. There is significant benefit in having a flexible process framework such as DAD which shows how everything fits together.

IT professionals should validate their own work to the best of their ability BUT they likely aren’t testing experts so therefore need help picking up the appropriate skills. The mantra in the agile community is to test often and test early, and better yet to test first. As a result agile teams have adopted a “whole team” approach where the development team does its own testing. This works when there are people on the team with sufficient testing skills and more importantly can transfer those skills to others. Minimally you will need to embed testers into your delivery teams, but you should also consider explicit training and mentoring of everyone on the team in testing and quality skills. You may find my agile testing and quality strategies article to be an interesting read.

Disciplined agile teams work in an iterative manner BUT still follow a lifecycle which is serial over time. On any given day people on a DAD project team may be performing analysis, testing, design, programming, deployment, or a myriad of other activities and iterating back and forth between them. But, the DAD lifecycle includes three distinct phases which are performed in order. So, DAD is both iterative in the small but serial in the large.

IBM Rational recently published an update to my Agility@Scale e-book, which can be downloaded free of charge. The e-book is a 21 page, 2.3 meg PDF (sorry about the size, guess the graphics did it) . It overviews the Agile Scaling Model (ASM) (which has since been replaced by the Software Development Context Framework (SDCF) ), Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), the scaling factors of agility at scale, and ends with some advice for becoming as agile as you can be. In short it's a light-weight coverage of some of the things I've been writing about in this blog the past couple of years. Could be a good thing to share with the decision makers in your organization if they're considering adoption agile strategies.

When it comes to testing on agile projects it is common practice for agile teams to adopt a "whole team testing" approach where the team itself does its own testing. To accomplish this agile teams will often embed testers in the development team. Programmers will work closely with the testers, often via non-solo development strategies such as pair programming, to pick up their valuable testing skills. The testers will in turn pick up new skills from the programmers, and in effect both groups will move away from being just specialists (testers or programmers) to being what's called generalizing specialists. Whole team testing can be very different from traditional approaches where programmers may do some testing, often unit testing of their own code, and then throw it over the wall to testers and quality assurance (QA) professionals for verification and validation.

The types of testing that the parallel independent test team performs may include:

Pre-production system integration testing. Does the solution work within your overall organizational ecosystem? Importantly, if this is one of several teams currently developing new solutions, does this team's solution work with what will be in production (including the work in progress of other teams) when they go to release? In mid-to-large organizations the only economical way to do this sort of testing is via an independent, centralized team.

Usability testing. Although it's possible to do usability testing on the development team, the reality is that usability testing is a specialized skill that few people have (although could pick up via non-solo development). Furthermore, particularly for solutions with many potential users, you may want to invest in a usability testing lab. This is a centralized resource, or an outsourced resource these days, which is shared across many teams.

Security testing. Security testing is also a specialized skill, albeit one well supported with sophisticated security testing tools such as the Rational Appscan suite which can be included in your continuous integration (CI) strategy. Many organizations will centralize their security testing efforts.

Exploratory testing. The fundamental goal of exploratory testing is to discover where the solution breaks, as opposed to confirmatory testing which focuses on showing that the solution conforms to the requirements (this is the type of testing the development team typically focuses on). Exploratory testing is also a skill, a good one which everyone should strive to pick up, but exploratory testers are often few in number in many organizations. So, to leverage their skills effectively you may want to have some of them on the independent test team while they mentor others while doing so.

Non-functional testing. Non-functional requirements have a tendency to fall through the cracks on some development teams. Knowing this the independent test team will often "test to the risk" and focus on non-functional issues.

And much more. The above points are just exemplars, not an exact list. Please follow some of the links above for greater detail.

I'd like to leave you with several important thoughts:

The developers still do the majority of the testing. Just because there's an independent test team it doesn't imply that they are the ones doing all the testing. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. They should be doing the minority of the testing effort, albeit the more difficult forms of it.

An independent test team will support multiple dev teams. For example, a test team of 5-6 people could support several development teams totalling 70 to 80 people. I typically look for a 15:1 or 20:1 ratio of developers to independent testers, hopefully even higher than that.

You need to consider better tooling. Although the development team will still be using common agile testing tools such as the xUnit and FIT frameworks the independent test team (ITT) will need more sophisticated tooling. First, the ITT will need to be able to report defects back to the team easily. When the development team is using a Jazz-based tool such as Rational Team Concert (RTC) then this can easily be done using either RTC (the web interface may be sufficient) or another Jazz-enabled product such as Rational Quality Manager (RQM). Second, the ITT will likely need more sophisticated testing tools, such as Rational Appscan for static and dynamic security testing and Rational Performance Tester (RPT) for performance testing (just two of several software quality management tools you should consider).

Independent testing is economical. Although I listed several tools in my previous point (hey, I do work for a vendor after all) an "unfortunate" implication of my advice (unfortunate for IBM at least) is that you can reduce the number of licenses that you require and still get this critical testing done by centralizing their use.

It may be a bit more complicated in regulatory environments. In a strict regulatory environment the independent test team may need to repeat, or at least validate, the testing efforts of the development team. In regulatory environments my fundamental advice is always this -- Have practical people, including yourself, read and interpret the regulations. If you leave it to the bureaucrats you'll get a bureaucratic solution.

This is an important scaling technique. Parallel independent testing, when done in an agile manner, is an important technique which you should consider when scaling agile strategies to meet the uniques needs of the situation that you find yourself in.

I've recently been working with Mark Lines of UPMentors and we've had some interesting discussions around evolving the Agile Manifesto which I thought I would share here to obtain feedback. Note that this is not any sort of official position of IBM, nothing in my blog is by the way (unless explicitly stated so), nor is it some sort of devious plot to take over the agile world (although if we did have some sort of devious plot, we'd make the exact same claim). What we hope to accomplish is to put some ideas out there in the hopes of getting an interesting conversation going.

Over the past decade we’ve applied the ideas captured in the Agile Manifesto and have learned from our experiences doing so. What we’ve learned has motivated us to suggest changes to the manifesto to reflect the enterprise situations which we have applied agile and lean strategies in. We believe that the changes we’re suggesting are straightforward:

Where the original manifesto focused on software development, a term which too many people have understood to mean only software development, we suggest that it should focus on solution delivery.

Where the original focused on customers, a word that for too many people appears to imply only the end users, we suggest that it focus on the full range of stakeholders instead.

Where the original manifesto focused on development teams, we suggest that the overall IT ecosystem and its improvement be taken into consideration.

Where the original manifesto focused on the understanding of, and observations about, software development at the time there has been some very interesting work done within the lean community since then (and to be fair there was very interesting work done within that community long before the Agile Manifesto was written). We believe that the Agile Manifesto can benefit from lean principles.

February 2011: At the 10th Anniversary of the Agile Manifesto get together several people, including myself, brought up the idea of updating the Agile Manifesto. Unfortunately the decision by the original writers of the manifesto was to adopt a very strict, non-agile change management approach where any changes to the manifesto would need the approval of all 17 of them. So, pretty much zero chance of there ever being any changes (hence the lack of changes so far).

June 2012: This extension to the manifesto was retitled "A Disciplined Agile Manifesto" and published as in the book Disciplined Agile Delivery written by myself and Mark Lines.

One of the scaling factors called out in the Software Development Context Framework (SDCF) is domain complexity. The general idea is that agile teams will find themselves in different situations where some teams are developing fairly straightforward solutions, such as an informational website, whereas others are addressing very complex domains, such as building an air-traffic control system (ATCS). Clearly the team building an ATCS will work in a more sophisticated manner than the one building an informational website. I don't know whether agile techniques have been applied in the development of an ATCS, although I have to think that agile's greater focus on quality and working collaboratively with stakeholders would be very attractive to ATCS delivery teams, I do know that agile is being applied in other complex environments: The 2009 Agility at Scale Survey found that 18% of respondents indicated that their organizations had success at what they perceived to be very complex problem domains,.

Increased domain complexity may affect your strategy in the following ways:

Reaching initial stakeholder consensus becomes difficult. One of the risk reduction techniques called out in Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) is to come to (sufficient) stakeholder consensus at the beginning of the project during the Inception phase (called Sprint 0 in Scrum or Iteration 0 in other agile methods). Stakeholder consensus, or perhaps "near concensus" or "reasonable agreement" are better terms, can be difficult to come to the more complex the problem domain is because the stakeholders may not fully understand the implications of what they're making decisions about and because there is likely a greater range of stakeholders with differing goals and opinions. The implication is that your project initiation efforts may stretch out, increasing the chance that you'll fall back on the old habits of big requirements up front (BRUF) and incur the costs and risks associated with doing so.

Increased prototyping during inception. It is very common for disciplined agile teams to do some light-weight requirements envisioning during inception to identify the scope of what they're doing and to help come to stakeholder consensus. The greater the complexity of the domain, and particularly the less your team understands about the domain, the more likely it is that you'll benefit from doing some user interface (UI) prototyping to explore the requirements. UI prototyping is an important requirements exploration technique regardless of paradigm, and it is something that you should consider doing during both initial requirements envisioning as well as throughout the lifecycle to explore detailed issues on a just in time (JIT) manner.

Holding "all-hands reviews". One strategy for getting feedback from a wide range of people is to hold an "all hands review" where you invite a large group of people who aren't working on a regular basis with your team to review your work to date. This should be done occasionally throughout the project to validate that the input that you're getting from your stakeholder represenatives/product owners truly reflects the needs of the stakeholders which they represent. The 2010 How Agile Are You? Survey found that 42% of "agile teams" reported running such reviews.

Increased requirements exploration. Simple modeling techniques work for simple domains. Complex domains call for more complex strategies for exploring requirements. The implication is that you may want to move to usage scenarios or use cases from the simpler format of user stories to capture critical nuances more effectively. A common misunderstanding about agile is that you have to take a "user story driven approach" to development. This is an effective strategy in many situations, but it isn't a requirement for being agile.

The use of simulation. You may want to take your prototyping efforts one step further and simulate the solution. This can be done via concrete, functional prototypes, via simulation software, via play acting, or other strategies.

Addition of agile business analysts to the team. Analysis is so important to agile teams we do it every day. In situations where the domain is complex, or at least portions of the domain is complex, it can make sense to have someone who specializes in exploring the domain so as to increase the chance that your team gets it right. This is what an agile business analyst can do. There are a few caveats. First, even though the domain is complex you should still keep your agile analysis efforts as light, collaborative, and evolutionary as possible. Second, this isn't a reason to organize your team as a collection of specialists and thereby increase overall risk to your project. The agile analyst may be brought on because their specialized skills are required, but the majority of the people on the team should still strive to be generalizing specialists. This is also true of the agile analyst because their may not be eight hours a day of valuable business analysis work on the team, and you don't want the BA filling in their time with needless busy work.

The important thing is to recognize that the strategies which work well when you're dealing with a simple domain will not work well for a complex domain. Conversely, techniques oriented towards exploring complex domains will often be overkill for simple domains. Process and tooling flexiblity is key to your success.

94% of teams which are claiming to be agile are providing value to stakeholders on a regular basis.

87% of teams which are claiming to be agile are validating their own work.

95% of teams which are claiming to be agile are working closely with stakeholders.

56% of teams which are claiming to be agile are self organizing.

88% of teams which are claiming to be agile are improving the process that they follow throughout the lifecycle.

Teams which are claiming to be agile often aren't. 53% of "agile teams" meet the five criteria, although 72% meet all but the self-organization criteria.

Teams which are moving towards agile but aren't there yet are reasonably close. 39% of those teams meet all five criteria and 63% meet all but self-organization.

I believe that there are several important implications:

Whenever someone claims to be on an agile team you may want to explore that claim a bit deeper.

The low level of self organization may be an indicator of cultural challenges with organizations in that their project managers aren't giving up sufficient control. The Agility at Scale survey in November 2009 found that 59% of respondents who indicated that their organization hadn't adopted agile techniques yet that a rigid culture was hampering their efforts. The IT Governance and Project Management survey in July 2009 discovered that "questionable behaviors", many of which were ethically questionable (I'm being polite), were far too common within IT project management.

Although "agile teams" may not be as agile as they claim, they're still doing better than traditional V-model teams, as revealed (again) by the 2010 IT Project Success survey.

If there was some sort of consensus within the agile community as to the criteria for determining whether a team is agile, I highly suspect that the agileness ratings would increase over time. What gets measured often improves.

However, how agile you are isn't anywhere near as important as getting better at what you're doing. So perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree on this issue. ;-)

One of the scaling factors of the Agile Scaling Model (ASM) is technical complexity.The fundamental observation is that the underlying technology of solutions varies and as a result your approach to developing a solution will also need to vary.It’s fairly straightforward to achieve high-levels of quality if you’re building a new system from scratch on a known technology platform, but not so easy when there are several technologies, the technologies are not well known, or legacy assets are involved.

New technology platforms.Your team may choose to work with a technology platform which is either new to the team or sometimes even new to the industry.In the past few years new technology platforms include the Android operating system, Apple’s iPad platform, and various cloud computing (http://www.ibm.com/ibm/cloud/) platforms.Working with these platforms may require you to adopt new development tools and techniques, not to mention the need to train and mentor your staff in their usage.Furthermore, your team may need to allocate time for architectural spikes to explore how to use the new technology and to prove the overall architecture with working code early in the project lifecycle (this is a DAD milestone).

Multiple technology platforms.IT solutions often run on multiple platforms.For example, a system’s user interface (UI) could run in a browser, access business logic implemented using J2EE on Websphere which in turn invokes web services implemented in COBOL running on a Z-series mainframe, and stores data in an Oracle database, a DB2 database, and in several XML files. Implementing new business functionality, or updating existing functionality, could require changes made on several of these platforms in parallel.The implication is that you’ll need to adopt tools and strategies which enable your team to develop, test, and deploy functionality on all of these platforms.Testing and debugging in particular will become more difficult as the number of technology platforms increases, potentially requiring you to adopt the practice of parallel independent testing.The Agility at Scale survey found that 34% of respondents indicated that their agile teams were working with multiple technology platforms.

Legacy data. IT solutions should leverage existing, legacy data wherever possible to reduce the number of data sources and thereby increase data quality within your organization.Also, using existing data sources can potentially speed up development, assuming your team has a good relationship with the owners of the legacy data sources (sadly, this often isn’t the case as the Data Management Survey found).Working with legacy data sources may require improved database regression testing, practices, database refactoring practices, and agile approaches to data administration. The Agility at Scale survey found that 42% of respondents indicated that their agile teams were working with legacy data sources (personally, I’m shocked that this figure is so low, and fear that many agile teams are contributing to data quality problems within their organization as a result).

Legacy systems.There are several potential challenges with legacy systems.First, the code quality may not be the best either because it was never really that good to begin with or because it’s degraded over the years as multiple people worked with it.You know you’ve got a quality problem if you’re either afraid to update the code or if when you do so you have to spend a lot of time debugging and then fixing problems revealed when doing the update.If the legacy system is a true asset for your organization you will want to pay off some of this technical debt by refactoring the code to make it of higher quality.Second, you may not have a full regression test suite in place, making it difficult to find problems when you do update the code let alone when you refactor it.Third, your development tools for your legacy code may be a bit behind the times.For example, I often run across mainframe COBOL developers still working with basic code editors instead of modern IDEs such as Rational Developer for System Z.Some of the strategies to deal effectively with legacy systems are to adopt a modern development toolset if you haven’t already done so (better yet, if possible adopt a common IDE across platforms and thereby reduce overall licensing and support costs) and to adopt agile practices such as static code analysis, dynamic software analysis, and continuous integration (CI).The Agile Project Initiation Survey found that 57% of respondents were integrating their new code with legacy systems and 51% were evolving legacy systems.

Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions.COTS solutions, also called package applications, can add in a few complexities for agile teams.The packages rarely come with regression test suites, they often have rules about what you can modify and what you shouldn’t (rules that are ignored at your peril), and they’re often architected with the assumption that they’re the center of the architectural universe (which is a valid assumption if they’re the only major system within your organization).As I describe in my article Agile Package Implementations it is possible to take an agile approach to COTS implementations, although it may require a significant paradigm shift for the people involved. The Agility at Scale survey found that 15% of respondents indicated that their agile teams were working with COTS solutions.

System/embedded solutions. For the sake of simplicity, if your team is developing a solution with both hardware and software aspects to it then you’re a systems project.Embedded systems are a specialization where the system has a few dedicated functions often with real-time constraints.Bottom line is that systems/embedded projects are typically more challenging than software-only projects – it gets really interesting when laws of physics starts to kick in, such as when you’re building satellites or space probes.I highly suggest Bruce Douglass’s book Real-Time Agility if you are interested in taking an agile approach to systems/embedded solution delivery.

The technical complexity faced by a project team is contextual – Working with four technology platforms is straightforward for someone used to dealing with seven, but difficult for someone used to dealing with just one.

I'm happy to announce that A Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum by Elizabeth Woodward, Steffan Surdek, and Matthew Ganis is now in print. I've been talking this book up in presentations and with customers the past few months and promised that I would let everyone know once it was available. I was one of several people who wrote forewords for the book, Ken Schwaber, Roman Pichler, and Matthew Wang also did so, and I've modified my foreword below to help you to understand a bit better what the book is about.

If you’re thinking about buying this book, you’re probably trying to answer one or more of the following questions: “What will I learn?”, “Should I spend my hard earned money on this book?”, “Will it be worth my valuable time to read it?”, and “Is this a book that I’ll refer to again and again?” To help you answer these questions, I thought I’d list a few user stories which I believe this book clearly fulfills:
As a reader I want:

a book that is well-written and understandable real-world examples that I can relate to

quotes from actual people doing this in the field

to understand the challenges that I’ll face with distributed agile development

As someone new to agile I want to:

learn the fundamentals of Scrum

understand the fundamentals of agile delivery

learn about what actually works in practice

discover how extend Scrum into an agile delivery process

As an experienced agile practitioner I want to learn:

how to scale agile approaches for distributed teams

how to overcome the challenges faced by distributed teams

how to tailor existing agile practices to reflect the realities of distribution

bout “new” agile practices which we might need to adopt

techniques so that distributed team members can communicate effectively

how to extend Scrum with proven techniques from Extreme Programming, Agile Modeling, and other agile methods

how to address architectural issues on a distributed agile team

how agile teams address documentation

how agile teams can interact effectively with non-agile teams

As a Scrum Master I want to learn how to:

lead a distributed agile team

facilitate a distributed “Scrum of Scrums”

facilitate the successful initiation of a distributed agile project

facilitate communication and collaboration between distributed team members

As a Product Owner I want to learn:

how to manage a product backlog on a distributed team

about different categories of stakeholders whom I will need to represent

about techniques to understand and capture the goals of those stakeholders

how to manage requirements with other product owners on other sub-teams

what to do during an end-of-sprint review

how I can streamline things for the delivery team that I’m working with

As an agile skeptic I want to:

see examples of how agile works in practice

hear about the challenges faced by agile teams

hear about where agile strategies don’t work well and what to do about it

I work with organizations around the world helping them to scale agile strategies to meet their real-world needs. Although this book is focused on providing strategies for dealing with geographical distribution, it also covers many of the issues that you’ll run into with large teams, complex problem domains and complex technical domains. An important aspect of scaling agile techniques is to first recognize that’s there’s more to scalability than dealing with large teams, something which this book clearly demonstrates.

At the risk of sounding a bit corny, I’ve eagerly awaited the publication of this book for some time. I’ve known two of the authors, Elizabeth and Matt, for several years and have had the pleasure of working with them and learning from them as a result. Along with hundreds of other IBMers I watched this book get written and provided input where I could. The reason why I’m so excited about it is that I’ve wanted something that I could refer the customers to that I work with and honestly say, “yes, we know that this works because this is what we do in practice”.

IBM is doing some very interesting work when it comes to scaling agile. We haven’t published enough externally, in my opinion, due to a preference for actively sharing our experiences internally. This book collects many of our experiences into a coherent whole and more importantly shares them outside the IBM process ecosystem. Bottom line is that I think that you’ll get a lot out of this book.

In Implementing Lean Software Development, Mary and Tom
Poppendieck show how the seven principles of lean manufacturing can be applied
to optimize the whole IT value stream. These principles are:

Eliminate waste. Lean thinking advocates regard any activity
that does not directly add value to the finished product as waste. The three
biggest sources of waste in software development are the addition of unrequired
features, project churn and crossing organizational boundaries (particularly
between stakeholders and development teams). To reduce waste it is critical
that development teams be allowed to self organize and operate in a manner that
reflects the work they’re trying to accomplish. Walker Royce argues in “Improving Software Economics” that the primary benefit of modern iterative/agile
techniques is the reduction of scrap and rework late in the lifecycle.

Build in quality.Your process should not allow defects to
occur in the first place, but when this isn’t possible you should work in such
a way that you do a bit of work, validate it, fix any issues that you find, and
then iterate.Inspecting after the fact,
and queuing up defects to be fixed at some time in the future, isn’t as
effective.Agile practices which build
quality into your process include test driven development (TDD) and non-solo
development practices such as pair programming and modeling with others.

Create knowledge.Planning is useful, but learning is essential.
You want to promote strategies, such as iterative development, that help teams
discover what stakeholders really want and act on that knowledge. It’s also
important for a team to regularly reflect on what they’re doing and then act to
improve their approach.

Defer commitment.It’s not necessary to start software
development by defining a complete specification, and in fact that appears to
be a questionable strategy at best. You can support the business effectively
through flexible architectures that are change tolerant and by scheduling
irreversible decisions to the last possible moment. Frequently, deferring
commitment requires the ability to closely couple end-to-end business scenarios
to capabilities developed in multiple applications by multiple projects.

Deliver quickly.It is possible to deliver high-quality
systems quickly. By limiting the work of a team to its capacity, which is
reflected by the team’s velocity (this is the number of “points” of
functionality which a team delivers each iteration), you can establish a
reliable and repeatable flow of work. An effective organization doesn’t demand
teams do more than they are capable of, but instead asks them to self-organize
and determine what they can accomplish. Constraining these teams to delivering potentially
shippable solutions on a regular basis motivates them to stay focused on
continuously adding value.

Respect people.
The Poppendiecks also observe that sustainable advantage is gained from
engaged, thinking people. The implication is that you need a lean governance
strategy that focuses on motivating and enabling IT teams—not on controlling
them.

Optimize the whole.If you want to be effective at a solution you
must look at the bigger picture. You need to understand the high-level business
processes that individual projects support—processes that often cross multiple
systems. You need to manage programs of interrelated systems so you can deliver
a complete product to your stakeholders. Measurements should address how well
you’re delivering business value, because that is the sole reason for your IT
department.

Lean thinking is important for scaling agile in several ways:

Lean provides an explanation for why many of the agile
practices work.For example, Agile
Modeling’s practices of light weight, initial requirements envisioning followed
by iteration modeling and just-in-time (JIT) model storming work because they
reflect deferment of commitment regarding what needs to be built until it’s
actually needed, and the practices help eliminate waste because you’re only modeling
what needs to be built.

Lean offers insight into strategies for improving your
software process.For example, by
understanding the source of waste in IT you can begin to identify it and then
eliminate it.

It provides techniques for identifying waste. Value stream mapping, a technique common within the lean
community whereby you model a process and then identify how much time is spent
on value-added work versus wait time, helps calculate overall time efficiency
of what you’re doing.Value stream maps are
a straightforward way to illuminate your IT processes, providing insight into
where significant problems exist. I’ve
created value stream maps with several customers around the world where we
analyzed their existing processes which some of their more traditional staff
believed worked well only to discover they had efficiency ratings of
20-30%.You can’t fix problems which you
are blind to.

One of the scaling factors called out in the Software Development Context Framework is “geographic distribution". As with the other scaling factors the level of geographic distribution is a range, with co-located teams at one extreme and far-located at the other. When your team is co-located the developers and the primary stakeholders are all situated in the same work room. If you have some team members in cubicles or in separate offices then you're slightly distributed, if you're working on different floors in the same building you're a bit more distributed, if you're working in different buildings within the same geographic area (perhaps your team is spread across different office buildings in the same city or some people work from home some days) then your team is more distributed, if people are working in different cities in the same country you're more distributed, and finally if people are working in different cities around the globe you're even more distributed (I call this far located).

As your team becomes more distributed your project risk increases for several reasons:

Communication challenges. The most effective means of communication between two people is face-to-face around a shared sketching space such as a whiteboard, and that requires you to be in the same room together. As you become more distributed you begin to rely on less effective communication strategies.

Temporal challenges. When people are in different time zones it becomes harder to find common working times, increasing the communication challenges. One potential benefit, however, is the opportunity to do "follow-the-sun" development where a team does some work during their workday, hands off the work to another team in a significantly different time zone, who picks up the work and continues with it. This strategy of course requires a high degree of sophistication and discipline on the part of everyone involved, but offers the potential to reduce overall calendar time.

Cultural challenges. As the team becomes more distributed the cultural challenges between sites typically increases. Different cultures have different work ethics, treat intellectual property differently, have different ideas about commitment, have different holidays, different approaches to things, and so on.

As you would imagine, because the project risk increases the more distributed your team is, the lower the average success rates of agile projects decrease as they become more distributed. The 2008 IT Project Success Survey found that co-located agile teams has an average success rate of 79%, that near located teams (members were in same geographic area) had a success rate of 73%, and that far-located agile teams had a success rate of 55%. The success rate decreases similarly for project teams following other paradigms.

The practices that you adopt, and the way that you tailor the agile practices which you follow, will vary based on the level of geographic distribution of your team. For example, a co-located team will likely do initial architecture envisioning on a whiteboard and keep it at a fairly high-level. A far-located team will hopefully choose to fly in key team members at the beginning of the project, at least the architecture owners on the various sub-teams, to do the architecture envisioning together. They will likely go into greater detail because they will want to identify, to the best of their ability, the interfaces of the various subsystems or components which they'll be building.

Interestingly, the Agility at Scale 2009 survey found that it was quite common for agile teams to be geographically distributed in some manner:

45% of respondents indicated that some of their agile teams were co-located

60% of respondents indicated that some of their agile teams had team members spread out through the same building

30% of respondents indicated that some of their agile teams were working from home

21% of respondents indicated that some of their agile teams had people working in different offices in the same city

47% of respondents indicated that some of their agile teams had team members that were far located

The bottom line is that some organizations, including IBM, have been very successful applying agile techniques on geographically distributed teams. In fact, agile GDD is far more common than mainstream agile discussion seem to let on.

One of the scaling factors called out in the Agile Scaling Model (ASM) is “regulatory compliance”. This name is a bit of a misnomer because this scaling factor really addresses two issues: complying to regulations imposed upon you from external sources and choosing to adhere to internal regulations willingly adopted by your organization. It is relatively common for agile teams to find themselves in such situations. For example, in the 2009 Agile Practices Survey one third of respondents said that they were applying agile on projects where one or more industry regulations applied.

First let’s consider external regulatory compliance. In these situations you may face the need to undergo an audit by an external regulatory body with consequences for non-compliance ranging from anywhere to a warning to a fine or even to legal action. Sometimes even a warning may be a grave thing. A few years ago I was working with a pharmaceutical company which had discovered that a warning from the FDA for non-compliance with their CFR 21 Part 11 regulation, when reported in major newspapers, resulted on average in a half-billion dollar loss to their market capitalization as the result of a dip in their stock price. There are financial regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II, informational regulations such as HIPAA which focuses on health information privacy, technical regulations such as ISO 27002 for security practices, and even life-critical regulations such as some of the FDA regulations.

External regulations are typically managed by a government organization or industry watchdog will range in complexity and can have a myriad of effects on project teams. For example, you may need to be able to prove that you had a documented process and that you followed it appropriately; you may need to produce extra artifacts, or more detailed artifacts, than you normally would; you may need to add extra features to your solution, such as tracking financial information, that you wouldn’t have normally implemented; you may need to produce specific reports to be submitted to the regulatory body; or you may even need to submit your team to audits, sometimes scheduled and sometimes not, to ensure regulatory compliance. Interestingly, even though many of those requirements go against the agile grain, the 2009 Agility at Scale Survey found that organizations were successfully applying agile techniques while still conforming to external regulations. So yes, it is possible to scale your agile strategy to address regulatory compliance.

Second, let’s consider compliance to internally adopted, or sometimes even developed, “regulations” which you will be potentially evaluated/appraised against. Perfect examples of these are process improvement frameworks such as CMMI and ISO 900x. Similar to external regulations, the 2009 Agility at Scale Survey found that some agile teams are succeeding in situations where they have chosen to adopt such frameworks. It’s important to note that frameworks such as CMMI aren’t primarily about ensuring the compliance of development teams to a standard process, regardless of what CMMI detractors may claim, but instead about process improvement. Process improvement at the IT department (or beyond) is an enterprise discipline issue from the point of view of ASM, implying that frameworks such as CMMI affect more than one scaling factor.

When you find yourself in a regulatory situation, whether those regulations are imposed or willingly adopted, the best advice that I can give is to read the regulations and develop a strategy to conform to them in the most agile manner possible. If you let bureaucrats interpret the regulations you’ll likely end up with a bureaucratic strategy, but if you instead choose to take a pragmatic approach you will very likely end up with a very practical strategy. Part of that strategy is to treat the regulatory representative(s) within your organization as important stakeholders whom you interact with regularly throughout the project.

You are invited to participate in my 2010 IT Project Success survey (http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/StateOfITUnion).
The goal of this survey series is to find out how we define IT project
success in practice and how successful our projects actually are. The
survey should take you about 5 minutes to complete, and your privacy will
be completely protected.

At the end of the survey you will be given
the chance to be entered into a draw for one of 10 copies of Reflections on
Management: How to Manage Your Software Projects, Your Teams, Your Boss,
and Yourself by Watts Humphrey and William R. Thomas published in April 2010
by Addison Wesley. I'm reading it right now and it's a really great
book.

This is an open survey, so the source data (without
identifying information to protect your privacy), a summary slide deck, and
the original source questions will be posted at www.ambysoft.com/surveys/ so
that others may analyze the data for their own purposes. Data
from previous surveys have been used by university students and
professors for their research papers, and hopefully the same will be true of
the data from this survey. The results from several other surveys
are already posted there, so please feel free to take advantage of
this resource.

Thank you very much for taking your valuable time to
fill out this survey.